Around the Bend

Not one but two train connections, hop off at Maassluis. It's not the edge of the earth, but you can see it from there.

The idea was to ride to the end of the Maas River to Hoek van Holland ("corner of Holland") and follow the North Sea coast as far as I had sunlight and/or energy. (You can see just how far I got on the updated NL bike map (100 kB).) Buckle up!...

The Dutch keep talking about how small their country is. Maybe so (although it doesn't feel like when trying to make progress on a bicycle), but of three man-made objects visible from the moon, two are in the Netherlands. This is more logical than it sounds. There is no nation on the planet more engineered than the Netherlands. Most of it couldn't, wouldn't even exist--certainly wouldn't be inhabitable with any style--without engineering. So let's look at a small example I came across less than a half hour into today's ride...

I'm pretty handy with a camera, but this construction just about got the best of me. This is one of two long arcs of metal (you can see the far one, across the mighty Maas, at far left). OK, now I am not kidding--when a storm surge is predicted, each arm swings off its concrete rest on each side of the river, floating together at its middle, and then the engineers flood them and they sink and form an instant dam, cutting off one of the largest rivers in Europe--and I mean dead cold. The scale of this thing is just unearthly. The ball bearings at the middle of each arm is 3 meters in diameter of solid steel.
 

I'm not sure I'm getting across to you the size of this thing. In the right half is one of the arms that will hold it against any storm surge the North Sea can throw at it. The little wispy things on the concrete are man-height guard rails. That thing passing way down under the arm's base (photographed through the arm) is the top of a tanker-handling tugboat.
 

OK, I'm impressed. I'm sorry if the pictures can't do it justice, but that's the way great things are, sometimes. But if you stand near it and hear the wind resonate through it, you'd know what I mean.

Hoek van Holland, for all the coolness of its name, amounts to a rather forgettable dock for ferries to Harwich, England. But around the corner and heading northeast, the North Sea is very pleasant indeed...AND it was nice finally to have the wind at my back.
 

And then...there was Scheveningen. Oh, my.

Scheveningen: the first town in the Netherlands I really hate. Hate, hate, hate--there, I said it. I guess there had to be one such place, and believe me, Scheveningen is it. Certainly not because of the extensive harbor area (pictured), which amounts to the jacht (Dutch word, though it doesn't mean boat) playstation for Den Haag (the Hague, also called 'S-Gravenhage by some Dutch, which besides being impossible to pronounce is also not confusing or anything). That's too bad--"Scheveningen" is such a lyrical and very Dutch name, the pronunciation of which betrayed more than one German soldier trying to act Dutch.
 

And I don't hate Scheveningen for the civilized south end of its beach, though it was too windy for the Den Haag glitterati to drink coffee and be seen on the south strand, even with the plexiglass wind breaks up. (The half-mast flag: for one week it was in honor of the Madrid train bombing, then for the passing of the beloved Princess Juliana.)
 

No, what drives me to say such awful things about Scheveningen is this--punks, thugs, hateful drivers, broken glass everywhere, horns honking, fingers, er, pointing at each other--as bad a beach scene as I've ever seen, and yes I've been to Panama City, Florida. All I wanted to do was get OUT of that place, and it makes me sad to think that I feel that way about any place in a country that has treated me so well. But I guarantee I'll never go back. Yuck and three-quarters.
 

But then the magic. Three minutes' ride to Scheveningen's north side, and you are, well, ceremoniously dumped into the dunes. Den Haag in the distance. More dunes ahead on the ride. Hundreds of places you will never see from a car and that I will probably never see again. Nothing but the whir of spokes and an occasional bird call. Rolling as far as I have strength and time.
 

And here you thought I forgot...the two Dutch-made works you can see from the moon are: the Afsluitdijk, and Flevoland. Aside from that, the Great Wall of China. Don't expect College Equivalency Points for knowing this.